Israeli cabinet approves West Bank land registration
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Arab countries including Egypt, Jordan and Qatar have condemned Israeli plans to push forward with the registration of parts of the occupied West Bank as Israeli state land. The move will pave the way for further settlement expansion in the Palestinian territory. Decades-old regulations barring non- Muslims from buying land in the West Bank will no longer apply.
Also in the programme: The pioneering black figure skater whose backflip at the Olympics thirty years ago was a brilliant move marked down by the judges; how AI is already transforming farming; and we look back at the life of the acclaimed american actor Robert Duvall - who's died at the age of ninety-five.
(Photo: A woman walks past a dirt barrier that was recently placed by the Israeli military, at the main entrance to Luban e-Sharkiya, between Nablus and Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, February 16, 2026. Credit: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.1 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:17.0 | We're beginning in the Middle East, in the territory that Israel occupies to the east of what the rest of the world regards as Israel proper. |
| 0:25.0 | We call it the West Bank, because it's to the west of the Jordan River, and it's the land which Israel has occupied since seizing it in the war of 1967, the land which, in the eyes of many foreign governments, should be at the heart of a future Palestinian state. |
| 0:40.1 | The news is that there is potentially, or that there has potentially, just been a very significant change on that occupied territory. |
| 0:49.7 | The Israeli cabinet has approved plans to make it easier for Jewish IsraeliIsraeli settlers to purchase land in the West Bank. |
| 0:56.8 | Arab countries and the European Union have condemned the move as illegal and amounting to de facto annexation. |
| 1:03.0 | And that word, annexation, is significant. |
| 1:07.2 | Because for all of Donald Trump's closeness to this hard-right Israeli government, |
| 1:11.5 | he has repeatedly stated and stated as recently as last week |
| 1:15.3 | that he is against Israel's outright annexation of the West Bank. |
| 1:20.7 | So what's going on? |
| 1:22.1 | The BBC's Joel Gunter is in Jerusalem. |
| 1:25.1 | I asked him what's changed as a result of this decision from the Israeli cabinet? |
| 1:30.0 | Israel, for the first time since it seized this territory, the occupied West Bank from Jordan back in |
| 1:36.0 | 1967, will be able to register land in a very significant portion of the West Bank under the |
| 1:44.1 | Israeli state. |
| 1:45.7 | It effectively turns it from what was an informal land registry process to a formal one |
| 1:51.8 | controlled by Israel. And the fear is that that could potentially lead to dispossession |
| 1:58.9 | for Palestinians who live in that area, known as Area C, which is under the |
| 2:03.9 | security control of Israel. But there are about 300,000 Palestinians that live there. And if they are |
| 2:11.2 | unable for some reason to prove that they have ownership, it will allow Israel to register that land formally under the |
... |
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